by Susan Lewis
‘Jack!’ Shelley yelled again.
‘Is it going to be all right?’ Zoe panicked.
‘You won’t let it die, will you, Daddy?’ Hanna wailed.
‘Jack!’ Shelley all but screamed.
At last he caught her voice and turned round.
‘My waters have broken,’ she yelled above the storm.
His eyes rounded in the moonlight, as driving rain whipped into his face and gusts tore at his hair.
‘We have to get to the lamb,’ Hanna cried, digging in her heels to make him go faster.
Shelley watched them, clutching the door frame as the first contraction bit down hard.
Jack seemed frozen.
Harry shouted again.
Hanna was pointing to the barn and yelling.
Shelley gave a quick pant. Hers wouldn’t be the first baby born in a stable, she reminded herself, provided she could get there.
The next contraction clawed so harshly she slumped to her knees.
She looked up just in time to see Jack disappearing into the barn.
CHAPTER THREE
VIVIENNE
Present Day
This wasn’t a place Vivi knew, or a feeling she recognized, or a sound she could identify through the strangeness of this elusive reality. Thump, wheeze, thump, click, bleep. On and on, never stopping, never changing: soft, loud, lilting, dropping … There was a fog, not in her eyes, yes, in her eyes, but in her head too, deep inside her brain, spreading all the way through her right out to the edges of her vision, circling brief moments of clarity in a dim, misty halo.
She blinked slowly, and felt a clutching sensation around her mouth. She thought she might be standing on the corner of the Fulham Road talking on the phone, waiting for an ambulance to pass.
The siren wailed into silence; voices rose and rippled across an invisible divide. Someone was speaking her name. ‘Vivienne, can you hear me? Vivi. Vivienne.’
The fog closed in, colourless and opaque, and everything went quiet again as she floated back into darkness, away from the strange sounds and confusion of pain.
A while later Vivi’s eyes flickered open again. She could see a vague, bluish light and blinked to try to focus on it. She felt dazzled and trapped, pinned inside a place she couldn’t distinguish. She tried to make sense of the peculiar noises around her: heavy whispers; loud, desperate breaths. An unsteady hush was punctured by bleeps; grazed by a constant, low-pitched hum.
She moved her pupils to the edge of their sockets. She was lying down, that much was clear, and without trying she knew she couldn’t get up. In the semi-darkness her gaze reached the long, loose limbs of someone sprawled on a chair. It was her brother, Mark. She’d been talking to him on the phone while on the corner of the Fulham Road. A siren shrilled as an ambulance went by …
Now Mark was here, beside her, his head and body slumped awkwardly as he slept. He seemed younger than his nineteen years, more like sixteen, although the stubble on his chin and shadows, like bruises, around his closed eyes aged him again.
There was someone beside him, in another chair. He was asleep too, his handsome yet grey face resting on one hand.
It was her stepfather, Gil, here to wish her happy birthday. He’d probably brought flowers. He always gave her flowers.
She tried to speak, but something was filling her mouth. She wanted to take it away, but her hand wouldn’t move, weighed down by something she couldn’t see. Her tongue was heavy and too weak to clear the blockage.
Confusion and fear descended on her, like clouds gently bursting with the threat of more to come. This was a hospital, she realized. She was in hospital, but why? What had happened to her? She felt a sudden, desperate need for her mother, so powerful that she wanted to cry out for her, but her voice was a small, stifled moan inside the mask over her mouth.
Mark’s eyes opened, and as he saw her watching him he sat forward so quickly he almost slipped from the chair.
‘Vivi?’ he croaked urgently. ‘Oh God, Vivi,’ and he started to cry. ‘Dad,’ he muttered over his shoulder. ‘Dad!’
Gil woke with a start and shot to his feet almost before he knew what he was doing. He looked rumpled and afraid. ‘Vivi, sweetie,’ he murmured, coming forward. ‘Oh, Vivi.’
A nurse suddenly swept into the room, summoned by only she knew what. She slipped in front of Mark and Gil, blocking them from Vivi’s view, but her face was kind, her voice reassuring.
‘I’ll get your mother,’ Gil said, and a moment later he was gone.
Mark stood silently watching the adjustment of tubes and patches, the checking of readings and making of notes on a tablet. The small, plump woman was calm and efficient, smiling as she smoothed the hair from Vivienne’s forehead to inspect her eyes.
‘Hello, Vivi Shager,’ she whispered in a soft, accented voice. ‘Nice to meet you.’
Vivi couldn’t answer, wasn’t even sure what she’d say if she could. It was hard to think, to register everything that was happening, to move beyond the terrible pain in her chest.
A face appeared beside the nurse, gaunt, pale and trying to be calm. As Vivi’s eyes locked to her mother’s she felt safe for a moment, the way she had as a child when Gina had moved in to make everything all right, but then the feeling was gone again.
Gina’s voice, her tone as she said, ‘I’m here,’ provided another brief lifeline, but Vivi didn’t know how to grasp it.
Flashes of memory were showing themselves now – the brightness of sunshine in Beaufort House, friends’ faces turning from laughter to confusion and horror; a stranger thumping her chest, sirens wailing – and as the stultifying reality of it overwhelmed her she closed her eyes again, trying to shut out the fear.
A week passed in frightening and painful stages; a slow and often doubtful return from a near-fatal myocardial infarction – in other words a major heart attack. Vivi had been told more than once that it was lucky a doctor had been at hand, and that she’d been so close to the hospital, because every second had counted.
Apparently she’d suffered two cardiac arrests in the ambulance, and had twice been brought back to life.
She had no memory of that short, frantic journey to A & E, although some residue of it seemed sometimes to filter into her dreams. What had come next, her arrival, the emergency treatment, also remained a blank, but she’d been told about the resuscitation efforts, the urgent transfer to a cardiac catheter lab, how her poor, struggling heart had collapsed into near-catastrophic failure.
She was in the High Dependency Unit now, having been moved from Intensive Care two days ago, though she wasn’t sure she could remember it happening. She remained weak and sometimes disoriented, as though she was tuning in and out of someone else’s world. The monitors she was attached to registered her heart’s functions, from its rhythm, to blood flow, to pressure, while the drainage tubes in her chest and bladder performed their unjolly, but necessary duties.
In more lucid moments she felt as though she’d been slammed by a speeding truck. It hurt to breathe, to move, even to think. In some ways thinking was the worst for it invariably took her to a place of panic, to a dark, unnatural world she might never now escape from.
People came and went: doctors, nurses, medical students, technicians, friends and colleagues. Everyone was trying to bolster her, to tell her how much better she seemed today, but she didn’t feel better, and didn’t know what to say to them.
She wasn’t herself. She’d changed in ways she didn’t yet understand; she just knew it had happened, not only in her heart, but in her head.
As her strength staged a tentative and unreliable return she was weighed daily and encouraged to eat and drink. Her heartbeat and blood pressure were held steady by the inotropic drugs being fed through the IV in her neck.
‘I think we can remove the pacing wires tomorrow,’ Arnie Novak, the cardiologist, had told her this morning. He was a nice man, Eastern European, she thought, but she couldn’t tell which country, and she di
dn’t like to ask. She hadn’t said much to anyone since waking; often she didn’t have the strength to utter more than a few words, and just as often she wanted to hide away from what she might be told.
Now, hearing footsteps approaching, she knew intuitively that they were heading her way, and that they belonged to her mother. It was a kind of telepathy that made her feel secure and relieved, but other things welled up in her too, such as anger and resentment, things her mother didn’t deserve. Breakfast was barely over and here was Gina, worried, frightened, and failing to understand why this had happened when they’d been told, twenty-seven years ago, following two-week-old Vivienne’s arterial switch operation, that they had no more to fear, she could lead a normal life.
As far as Vivi was aware no one understood what had gone wrong, or, if they did they hadn’t yet told her whether the serious episodes she’d just suffered were in any way connected to the congenital heart defect she’d been born with.
‘How are you feeling?’ her mother asked fondly, putting down the magazines she’d brought in and pressing a kiss to Vivi’s forehead. Vivi caught the citrusy scent of her, light and fresh with the earthy warmth that came from her skin – as familiar as the sound of her voice and the movements of her hands.
How was she feeling?
‘Fine,’ Vivi replied. Her voice was stronger than a whisper now, but not as full as it should be. What was the point in telling the truth when there was nothing her mother could do to change things?
‘No pain?’
Vivi shook her head. She didn’t class the constant hurting in her chest as pain any more; it was more of an ache that occasionally flared up into something hot and untameable until the drugs kicked in.
‘How are you?’ Vivienne asked. ‘You look tired.’
Gina’s blink made her seem slightly lost, as though she’d forgotten that she might matter, and Vivi felt a flood of love filling her struggling heart. Funny how emotions didn’t hurt – or they did, but in a different way. They worried her too, in case they were causing undue strain, especially the negative ones. ‘Did you sleep last night?’ she asked.
Gina smiled. ‘I did,’ she said, but Vivi knew it wasn’t true. ‘You have a very comfortable bed.’
Thinking of her flat was as difficult as thinking of all other aspects of the life that was going on without her, and would continue to as if she’d died that day in Beaufort House. The world wouldn’t wait for her, it simply wasn’t possible, but she wasn’t to worry, her boss had told her when he’d come to visit, she’d still have a job when she was strong enough to return.
No one had told her that was never going to happen, but they didn’t have to, because on a deep and intractable level she knew it anyway.
Greg had come to see her, twice, but he’d seemed so awkward the last time that she’d almost asked him right then not to come again. His wide, baffled green eyes hadn’t been able to hide the panic he felt, or the helplessness, or the shameful need to escape. She could tell he hated himself for it. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about her, she was sure he did, but he wasn’t able to cope with her being anything other than the vibrant young woman he’d been dating. She’d decided to text him after he’d left. It would be easier that way, no pretence that things could be the same when she got out of here, no difficult goodbyes. She needed to be as pragmatic and brave about this as her mother was trying to be; as truthful and unemotional as the charts detailing her progress and mapping the way into her future.
She didn’t feel brave or pragmatic, or like being truthful or detached; what she felt was shattered and terrified, a wreck of the person she really was – and beyond angry with the cruel fate that had put her here.
She would fight it; show it who was in charge. It wasn’t going to win this battle and it might as well know it now. She’d find the weapons she needed, strength of body and spirit, indestructible determination of mind, belief in herself. Her dreams might lie in shattered pieces now, the debris of a collision with life’s capricious and brutal plans, but she wasn’t a puppet to be jerked about on the end of some random, intangible strings. She’d put everything back together and go on as she was before …
The flame of defiance was hard to keep alight when it was constantly assailed by fear; and when it sometimes took all her strength simply to summon the breath to speak.
‘Where’s Mark?’ she asked her mother, her voice low, the words croaked with effort.
‘I let him sleep on,’ Gina replied, taking out a tissue to wipe something from Vivienne’s cheek. A speck of breakfast? Maybe it was a tear. She felt like crying all the time, crying and crying as if somehow the flood would widen and deepen and carry her away from all this.
‘I’m sure he’ll be here as soon as he wakes up,’ Gina added.
Vivienne remembered being told that he was sleeping on the sofa in her sitting room, the one she’d bought mostly for when he came to stay. She wished she could see him there. More than that, she wished he wasn’t there, because then this might not be happening. ‘He should be at uni,’ she said.
‘His exams haven’t started yet and he wants to be close.’ Gina drew a handful of white envelopes from her bag.
Vivienne looked at them and guessed they were get-well wishes from her mother’s friends and clients.
Gina watched her uncertainly. ‘Shall I put them away again?’ she asked, clearly ready to do so.
Vivienne didn’t know what to tell her, so she said, ‘Where’s Gil?’
‘Still at the hotel, I think.’
Gil, her wonderful, loving stepfather who’d left her mother, and Vivienne still didn’t know why. Or did she? For the moment she was struggling to get things straight in her head. She knew she’d asked many times, but had she ever been given an answer? ‘Is it awkward for you?’ she ventured.
Gina seemed puzzled, and Vivienne felt a stir of irritation. She’d apparently asked a question that didn’t chime with reality, or her mother was pretending it didn’t.
‘Why would you say that?’ Gina replied carefully.
‘I don’t know … I was … I’m glad he came.’
‘Of course he came. He loves you very much, you surely can’t doubt that.’
Vivienne loved him too, and had always wished he was her real father. Mark would be her real brother then, and they’d be a proper family with no divisions or secrets …
Gina gently curled her fingers round Vivienne’s. ‘Don’t worry, my darling, your memory will piece everything together again soon,’ she promised.
Vivienne nodded, but wondered how she would know if she was functioning normally when she couldn’t be sure what normal was any more. ‘Do you wish you’d tried harder to hang onto him?’ she asked hoarsely.
Gina looked so vulnerable for a moment that Vivienne almost said sorry, but then Gina was covering her feelings with a smile as she said, ‘It was all a long time ago …’
‘Almost ten years,’ Vivi put in, wanting to prove that she knew.
‘Indeed. We’ve moved on since then …’
‘Why did you let him go?’
Gina’s gaze didn’t waver as she said, ‘Why are we having this conversation? It’s hardly important …’
‘You pushed him away. You always do that.’
Gina didn’t answer and Vivi felt herself falling into a sinking, darkening sense of defeat, or exhaustion, or something she didn’t really understand. She too wondered why they were having this conversation, when she felt sure they’d had it many times. Maybe it was because that bleak and difficult period when Gil left was easier to think about than the one they were entering into now. The one that she might not survive … Why was no one talking about that? Or maybe she’d been told she wasn’t going to make it and had blotted it from her mind.
‘Would you like to sleep?’ Gina asked gently.
Vivi realized her eyes were closed.
‘I can stay, or I can go,’ Gina said. ‘Whichever you prefer.’
Vivi wanted her to stay
, wanted her never to leave so she could somehow make this all right, but she said, ‘You can go if you like.’
Gina settled herself into a chair and stayed.
There was a man standing at the gate, tall and fair-haired with his hands on his hips and a big smile on his face.
‘There’s my daddy,’ Michelle whooped, and zooming off across the schoolyard she leapt straight into his arms, yelping and laughing as he spun her round and around.
‘And how was your first day at school?’ he asked, holding her aloft so he could see her sunny, freckly face, a small child’s version of his own.
‘It was really good,’ she told him eagerly. ‘My teacher is really nice, and I’ve got a locker all to myself.’
As he gasped in awe, five-year-old Vivienne watched, her eyes round and puzzled. This big, friendly man who was like a film star was Michelle’s daddy!
‘This is my best friend, Vivi,’ Michelle declared, sliding out of her father’s arms and grabbing Vivi’s hand in a proud, proprietorial fashion. ‘Vivi, this is my daddy.’
‘Well hello, Vivi,’ the tall man said, gazing down at Vivi with blue eyes that seemed to laugh and ask questions all at the same time. ‘That’s a very pretty name you have there.’
‘That’s what I said,’ Michelle told him. ‘It’s Vivienne, really. Our birthdays are nearly on the exact same day.’
Sounding impressed, he said to Vivi, ‘So you were born on February 15th as well?’
Vivi shook her head. She felt shy of him, but she liked him too and wanted to say something to please him. ‘I was born on April 15th,’ she said proudly, hoping it might make him realize she was as special as her grandpa always said she was.
‘See, the exact same day,’ Michelle chipped in, ‘just different months. So I will be six first, but it doesn’t matter, because we don’t care who’s the oldest, do we?’ she asked Vivi.
Vivi shook her head. It had been a whirlwind of a day, starting school, meeting Michelle, finding herself with a best friend for the first time ever, and now she didn’t want it to end.
‘Where’s your mummy?’ Michelle asked, looking around at the parents who were busily claiming their children.